Carlyn Hunter painter, potter, documentary maker, socialite, wife/homemaker on three continents and mother of two has just sold three quarters of her first solo exhibition in London. Hunter is half American and half British but she feels much more English. A glamourous up-beat blonde Hunter is not usually lost for words but her British half is literally speechless about the success of her new genre of oil paintings.
Hunter enjoyed the fluidity and looseness of the medium that allowed her to work with her hands and her heart. She felt the bowls and watercolours were the yin and yang of her inner workings.
Originally a picture restorer Hunter branched out into traditional botanical painting working with famous names like Jenny Phillips from the Botanical School of Melbourne and Mary Harden of the Botanical School of Illustration in San Francisco. Her delicate watercolour specimens are coveted in London. The Flower Power show in Mayfair’s Gallery 54, is her first for oil painting and pottery, the opening night was a jamboree of London’s aficionados and aristocracy, who did not hold back with the red dots, up-market decorators came in their droves including Nina Campbell and Jane Churchill.
Hunter has homes in London, Wyoming, California and Costa Rica, when her children grew up and were independent she felt compelled to embark on an adventure that began with ceramics. Hunter enjoyed the fluidity and looseness of the medium that allowed her to work with her hands and her heart. She felt the bowls and watercolours were the yin and yang of her inner workings. Having experienced such creative liberation Hunter was unable to return to the precise realism of botanical painting; she put her best foot forward into her renaissance as an oil painter, in fauvism style, still concentrating on natural subjects. Hunter is delighted with the phenomenally positive response to her show, she now has the confidence to develop her new trajectory.